The Trouble with Reality | Meghan O’Gieblyn
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The Trouble with Reality | Meghan O’Gieblyn
Our understanding of the world is built up of innumerable layers. Each layer is worth exploring, as long as we do not forget that it is one of many. Knowing all there is to be known about one layer — a most unlikely event — would not teach us much about the rest. The integration of the enormous number of bits of information and the resulting vision... See more
The Marginalian • Pioneering Biochemist Erwin Chargaff on the Poetics of Curiosity, the Crucial Difference Between Understanding and Explanation, and What Makes a Scientist
In order to do science, we had to translate these quantum phenomena into the language of classical physics—referring to cause and effect, space and time—accepting even as we did so that this language was necessarily metaphoric and anthropocentric.
Meghan O'Gieblyn • God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
Specifically, Kant wrote, we can picture reality as being consistent and continuous, or as being broken into discrete chunks, and we can make perfectly logical and coherent arguments supporting both conclusions even though those conclusions explicitly contradict each other. This happens because we assume something about reality that only comes into
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